What the ‘Little Women’ Outrage Is Conveniently Missing
Recently, former New York Times film critic Janet Maslin shared her “disbelief” regarding attitudes toward filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s recent adaptation of Little Women (one of several, with the first woman-helmed one coming in 1994 from Gillian Armstrong), which has been ignored and rebuffed by men in Maslin’s circle. She tweeted that “[t]he Little Women problem is very real. I don’t say that lightly and am very alarmed. In the past day I have been told by 3 male friends who usually trust me that they either refuse to see it or probably won’t have time. Despite my saying it’s tied for #1 of 2019.” She is also troubled by the relative lack of appreciation the film has received from awards committees, from the major ones to the critics’ associations, and even ones with exclusively female membership. Maslin has also engaged with continuing conversation around her tweet, retweeting praise for the film from some male film critics as well as responding to critiques of her stance.
Maslin’s concern for Little Women, which is distributed by Sony, strikes me as outsized and off-key. Why, of all films, publicly lament the anecdotal misogyny faced by Greta Gerwig’s Little Women? Well, I know why. But first it’s important to point out a distinction the critic has herself made—while she is shocked by male hostility she has witnessed toward the film, she doesn’t hope to goad men into seeing a film out of feminist duty. Instead, she’s troubled by the perception of the film by a fraction of those who haven’t yet seen it. And Maslin, to be fair, is a curious critic who gives all kinds of films a chance, but there is still subliminal messaging in the particularity of her Little Women feelings.
Gerwig’s latest project is positioned for the mainstream, particularly the mainstream of people now sympathetic to women’s issues and ideas. Or let me be specific: white, straight, cis middle- and upper-class white women’s issues and ideas. And for these white professional women of means, their foremost audience—even beyond other women—is their white male counterparts. This is the ideology of corporatized, lean-in feminism, which springs from the fountain of neoliberal thinking—if the men won’t reward our striving, we will never achieve their power. While Maslin has written about and praised films by non-white, poor, and queer women and men, her most vocal outrage of the year of course belongs to the kind of film that was meant to succeed in the first place: the career-successful white feminist manifesto, in period dress.
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